Qian Zhongshu: a Grandmaster in a Fortress Besieged
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
QIAN ZHONGSHU: A GRANDMASTER IN A FORTRESS BESIEGED Ji JIN Department of Chinese Literature, Soochow University 199 Renai Road, SIP, China [email protected] Qian Zhongshu was one of the greatest contemporary scholars, novelists and men of letters, and he also was one of the great literary comparativists of the world because of his burning wit and formidable erudition. Qian is distinguished among other writers and scholars for his broad understanding of both the Chinese classics and Western literary traditions. This essay discusses Qian Zhongshu’s role as a grandmaster who interconnects Chinese and Western cultures. The first part introduces Qian’s creative writing before the 1940’s. The second part presents Qian’s formidable interpretation of Chinese classical literary and artistic traditions in On the Arts of Poetry and Limited Views and the grand pattern of Qian’s works. The third part discusses the influence of Qian’s principle of “harmony without uniformity” in Sino-Western intercultural dialogue. All in all, Qian Zhongshu established the great example of comparative culture study of the East and the West. Key words: Qian Zhongshu, literary interpretation, intercultural dialogue Qian Zhongshu 钱锺书 (1910 – 1998), styling himself Mocun 字默存, Hao Huaiju 号槐聚, once adopted the pseudonym of Zhongshu Jun 中书君. During his decades-long literary career, Qian contributed a corpus of insightful scholarly works and creative works of literature. The vicissitudes of his life experience do not work against the stretching of his cultural life. On the contrary, he always advanced with sharp vision, and created a profound and unique discursive space with his oeuvre. In it vast phenomena and ideas across Chinese and Western cultural traditions form three-dimensional dialogues in an interactive way, which, in turn, highlight the poetic and literary mind shared by China and the West. Qian’s discursive space has reached such profundity and scope in recognizing and elucidating the essence of human culture that he fully deserves the title of a grandmaster in academe and beyond. 1 Asian and African Studies, Volume 21, Number 1, 2012 一 If putting aside his writing of old (traditional) poetry vis-à-vis new (modern) poetry, Qian’s creative writing has been completed in the 1940’s. His literary creation covers prose, fiction and old poetry, and all of these writings display Qian’s self-assured creativity in his younger days. His prose and fiction are sharp-edged, subtle and outpouring, in which he moves with ease between lines to ridicule mercilessly social moods and the literati world, and to philosophize about life. These qualities of Qian’s works fully demonstrate his artistry as a man of letters and work to establish his image as a writer. Extensive criticism exists regarding Qian’s literary works. Yet I just want to call into focus the fact that, whether in Writing from the Margins of Life (写在人生边上), or Men, Beasts and Ghosts (人兽鬼), or Fortress Besieged (围城),1 Qian has laid bare his insights into “existential condition” and “human nature” from the margins of life. Thus, cultural positioning and ideological inclinations as manifest in the preface to Writing from the Margins of Life constituted the basic spirit of Qian’s creative writing all along. This basic spirit is about his habitual self-positioning so much as an outsider, away from the mainstream, while annotating life at any time. Though Writing from the Margins of Life, Men, Beasts and Ghosts and Fortress Besieged vary in genre, they echo each other, thus achieving a high degree of internal coherence. For instance, the title of Men, Beasts and Ghosts is derived from four short stories —— “God’s Dream” (上帝的梦), “Cat” (猫), “Inspiration” (灵感), “Memorial” (纪念) which contain the images of man, beast, ghost and God. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, this book portrays man, and implies that humanity, barbarity and monstrosity are inter-linked. “God’s Dream”, written in the form of a fable, reveals the flaws of human nature; “Cat” displays human weakness; “Inspiration” debunks the deep-rooted bad habits of literati by illuminating the married life of Li Jianhou (李建侯) and his wife; “Memorial” illustrates self-teases in life through portraying Manqian’s (曼倩) emotional entanglement. Qian probes deeper into human weakness in Fortress Besieged: marriage and life are both fortresses besieged. It is the state of siege that is reminiscent of universal human existence, which Qian treats with high intellect. When situating Fortress Besieged in Qian’s discursive space and interpreting it with related authorial treatises, we will find out that Fortress Besieged unfolds a condition of Ausweglosigkeit (impasse).2 Hongjian (鸿渐), the name of the male 1 Cf. HUNTERS, T. Qian Zhongshu. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982; BENICKÁ, J. “Some Remarks On the Satirical in Qian Zhongshu's Novel Fortress Besieged.” In Autumn Floods: Essays in Honour of Marián Gálik, edited by Raoul D. Findeisen and Robert D. Gassmann, pp. 351 − 61. 2 Qian Zhongshu. Limited Views: Essays On Ideas and Letters [管锥编], p. 574. 2 Qian Zhongshu: a Grandmaster in a Fortress Besieged protagonist, springs from The Book of Changes (易经), meaning a bird flying about everywhere, from sea to land, from ground to tree tops, and finally to the top of the hill, in the perpetual quest for a nest, a constant searching for home in a volatile situation. Fang Hongjian has achieved nothing abroad, and upon his return, he is no less than a failure in professional, emotional and married life, and ends up wondering alone after his marriage falls apart. Furthermore, he fails to find a solution or a destination, and gets stranded in the state of Ausweglosigkeit. Hongjian corresponding to the “fortresses besieged”, bespeaks a feeling of helplessness and compassion concerning life. This existential predicament may also bring out another situation in life. Under societal and existential pressure, human beings are unable to find a way out, and can do nothing but drift with the wind. Even amongst an ocean of people, one feels solitary and forlorn. How plaintive this scenario is! Springing from there, it is easy for us to catch a glimpse of Qian’s conception of Existentialism and Modernity intricately embedded in Fortress Besieged. Qian moves away from the limited perspective of a certain group of “Fang Hongjian’s” into a domain where he unfolds existence of humankind as a whole and reflects on modern life in and beyond the Chinese context. Thus, the mundane roaming life of Fang Hongjian takes on a look of enormous generality and huge symbolic significance. In this way, the confessional strains of the ending make perfect sense. For Qian, being a scholar and a writer at the same time is to bring into full play talent in different areas. Interrelated as they are, they are not equitable or one and the same, in the form of the so-called scholarly novel (学人小说). To put it differently, Qian probably attempts to bridge the deep rift between scholars and writers, and explores the possibilities of combining his dual identity as a scholar-writer by creative means. The text of Fortress Besieged, consciously or unconsciously, draws on Qian’s solid footing in Chinese and Western cultural traditions, but is devoid of pedantic poetry by scholars. Therefore, Fortress Besieged is more a typical knowledge-based text than a scholarly novel. If Fortress Besieged is seen as the peak of Qian’s creative writing, then Discourses on Art (谈艺录) represents his highest achievement of research in the 1940’s, and the best illustration of how the qualities of “literati” and “scholars” can be mutually complementary and instrumental as in the case of Qian. On the Arts of Poetry has paved the way for Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters (管锥编) in terms of both profundity and textuality.3 Discourses on Art inherits traditional poetry criticism, and making fine analysis reflects Qian’s objective in composing this book. Qian’s individual poetics not only exist within traditional 3 See the excellent treatments under the above title by Ronald Egan published in Cambridge (Mass.) and London by Harvard University Press 1998 and by MOTSCH, Monika. Mit Bambusrohr und Ahle: Von Qian Zhongshus Guanzhuibian. Zu einer Neubetrachtung Du Fus. Bern: Peter Lang, 1994. 3 Asian and African Studies, Volume 21, Number 1, 2012 Chinese criticism, but also in between poetic prose, old sayings, proverbs, and various folk art forms, and even more so in between Chinese and Western cultural traditions in which traditional Chinese criticism is linked up to Western literary theories. All this constitutes the hallmark and the greatest contribution of his scholarly work. Discourses on Art: Preface displays the idiosyncratic line of thinking, in the quest for the shared literary mind across Chinese and Western cultural traditions, which forms a necessary access to our understanding of Discourses on Art and the rest of Qian’s oeuvre.4 Discourses on Art, written in the form of traditional reading notes, contains 91 transcripts and 24 additional annotations, and the enlarged version doubles its length. Its content covers a wide range: mostly of poetry alongside other literary genres; extends into other fields of social sciences, with special attention to literature; focuses on the Tang, Ming and Qing dynasties, yet also traces back to the pre-Qin era, in connection with ancient and modern Western culture. This book begins with the formulation of “Tang and Song poetry”, and advances with the two parallel threads of “specific artistic appreciation and evaluation”5 and studies of Chinese and Western poetics. Qian puts forward ingenious readings of the poems written by Chen Shidao (陈师道, 1053 – 1102), Li He (李贺, 790 – 816), Lu You (陆游, 1125 – 1210), Wang Yuyang (王渔洋, 1634 – 1711), Zhao Oubei (赵瓯北, 1727 – 1814) and others.